Superfly

Dec 31, 2010

I should not let this year end without another post. It has been very quite around here lately and a status update is in order.

For the past couple of months, I've been working on a new venture called Superfly. The best way to describe superfly, is like mint.com for travel. Our goal is to help you maximize your travel rewards. Get more points/miles and use them wiser. It is clear that most people are not making the correct choices, thus, leaving a lot of money on the table. You can see the full pitch, by my new partner Jonathan Meiri, as it was presented in the latest TC Disrupt. We are working on launching our beta, for which you can sign up at superfly.com.

I joined Jonathan as a technical co-founder. Some call it CTO, some call it VP R&D, but the matter of fact is that I'm just a hacker. Well, I'm not hacking into any system, I'm hacking a system together. For the past 7 years I've been working primarily in Java. It is a very serious language, devised by people with beards, glasses and checkered flannel shirts. And now for something completely different (did you get it?). No more beards, no more serif text. I'm going Python and Django. It feels a lot more like hacking.

It is going to be a very different experience for me. Unlike my previous venture, I have a partner and we are looking for funding (ping me if you have any :-). It is not a bootstrap effort. We already have offices, not working from home or coffee shops. It is a consumer web application which appeals to a very broad audience, as opposed to my previous product which is a niche desktop one, mainly for professional users.

It is not the first time I'm doing consumer-webapps, though. I was doing that for about 4 years while working in Amdocs. Going back to the technology aspect, it was a very different stack. We were using J2EE (before it lost the 2) with all sorts of beans in the backend. Struts 1.x was driving the web side with ugly JSPs. Ajax was still a cleaning product at the time, and JavaScript was for web masters, so we were too important to deal with it. And... XMLs. A sea of XMLs. Enough XMLs for a lifetime. To quote one of my favorite all time tweets: "Java is a DSL for taking large XML files and converting them to stack traces" (from @avalanche123).

Working with Django and Python is a very refreshing change. While I still miss the cushy type system, I can see myself becoming far more productive. It's really about doing more with less, about minimalism and pragmatism, and I'll probably write some posts about it in the near future (if I'll have time, that is :-). I'm still loyal to the Eclipse ecosystem and PyDev is now my tool of choice. It is not bug-free, but, after some tweaking and configuration, it seems like a worthy companion. Again, a post on that experience is in the works.

Overall, I'm really excited about Superfly. I strongly believe in the idea, in my partner and I'm grateful for the opportunity to stretch myself to new areas. I strongly recommend it for anyone who can. Challenge yourself.